Fastly
Fastly, which was founded in 2011, has grown into a mature content delivery network (CDN) company.
Fastly provides a variety of services, including streaming media delivery and private CDN, but the company is most recognised for being a ‘real-time CDN,’ which means that changes are reflected immediately and the platform is capable of delivering ‘uncacheable’ content.
A few of Fastly’s most notable features are content delivery and image optimisation for dynamic assets, the cache for unpredictably changing content, and images from the edge; video streaming across multiple devices and platforms; load balancing with application auto-scaling; and cloud security, including instant traffic reports and attach mitigation.
The pricing structure is straightforward and simple to grasp, with a monthly minimum payment of $50, while bandwidth is charged at a variable cost that varies according to location. Users can use the pricing estimator to figure out how much their monthly bill will be. Fastly’s servers come equipped with 24TB of solid-state storage, 768GB of RAM, and four 25-gigabit Ethernet ports on each side.
Cloudflare
Cloudflare is the world’s largest content delivery network (CDN) provider. A CDN is a system that provides a caching and acceleration layer for a website and its content.
Cloudflare provides a free service that delivers content to millions of websites and provides additional services that are either free or paid for. It’s important to note that cloudflare.com is not a CDN and does not provide caching and accelerating layers for websites, but it can provide other services for companies wanting to improve their performance and security.
Cloudflare provides a number of services that help to provide the best possible user experience, including protection from network attacks, improved SEO, enhanced reliability, and more. Cloudflare services are provided in a number of ways including through self-hosted solutions and SaaS solutions.
It is a successful mix of network security and performance solution that boosts the speed of websites or networks while also protecting websites, mobile applications (APIs), and SaaS services (Software as a Service). It is one of the most prominent Content Delivery Networks available on the market today.
This content delivery network (CDN) solution accelerates and improves the performance of networks, websites, apps, and APIs. It functions as a network of proxy servers and data centres (there are more than 100 of them) placed all over the world, and it serves more than 10 trillion requests each month through this network. The service has the capability of managing 10Tbps of bandwidth for its subscribers.
When it comes to website security, the most important thing to consider is protection against SQL injection, which is an attack on the website’s code. Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) assaults, which are becoming increasingly common due to the exploitation of unsecured Internet-of-Things devices, are also protected. Because of these downtimes, the average hourly cost can reach as high as $100,000 per hour.
Similarities and Differences
Both Fastly and Cloudflare are “new” or “modern” CDNs that operate as a reverse proxy.
Fastly is focused purely on CDN (i.e. performance features) as well as delivering video.
Cloudflare is a security and performance service, providing DDoS protection, WAF, and CDN.
Cloudflare does not offer any video delivery. Fastly does not offer DNS services. Cloudflare is one of the world’s largest DNS providers.
Fastly charges based on usage and Cloudflare is flat-rate.
Fastly is built on Varnish and Cloudflare is built on Nginx. (in both cases, highly customized)
